Problem with Lexical Scope

[jslowery at gmail.com]

I am not completely knowledgable about the status of lexical scoping in
Python, but it was my understanding that this was added in a long time
ago around python2.1-python2.2

I am using python2.4 and the following code throws a "status variable"
not found in the inner-most function, even when I try to "global" it.

def collect(fields, reducer):
    def rule(record):
        status = True
        def _(x, y):
            cstat = reducer(x, y)
            if status and not cstat:
                status = False
            return y
        return reduce(_, [record[field] for field in fields])
    return rule

What gives?